#obviously everyone is free to like or dislike whichever characters they wish

[ehlnofay]

i haven't played through the DB plotline in 87 years, but id love to hear your thoughts on astrid !! u said she's more interesting than ppl give her credit for and i 100% agree but i can't articulate it well lol

♥ @reachfolk

It's a little bit difficult to explain because a lot of the things people say about her aren't wrong, they're just oversimplified. She's the target of a lot of vitriol that I don't think is warranted.

Like, yes, she is not a good person - she runs an assassin guild, I wasn't aware that being morally sound was even on the table. She screws the player over, and I understand that that is upsetting. But her character doesn't start and end at how she makes the player feel, you know?

She was clearly a good leader who cared deeply about the Brotherhood, both as an organisation and as individuals. Everyone in the sanctuary adores her to an almost unsettling level, so she evidently must have been doing something right. She's welcoming to the player character and goes out of her way to find a good job to send them on quickly. I, at least, never got the sense that she utterly hated the player at any point, although she definitely got well used to her power and status and got very defensive at the prospect of it possibly being taken away. It seems like her betrayal was a decision to minimise harm by giving Maro the one that committed the murder of his son in exchange for the lives of the six others, in addition to upholding the brotherhood's status quo (I don't deny that one of her motivations was to maintain her position as leader).

I'm not saying that she's a good person, or even a necessarily redeemable person - no-one has to like her, but I'm saying that she's allowed to be complicated and to do things that players won't like.(Again. It's an assassin's guild. Was anyone expecting that the characters would have behaviour and philosophies that lined up perfectly with their own?)

Also, I feel that I have to note that it could be argued that Cicero's actions weren't much better, and he was a character who is widely loved. He also makes bad decisions that cause harm, also turns on some of the others in the Sanctuary, and also tries to kill the player. (And his motive is religious fervour, not an attempt to minimise the number of deaths.) These aren't obviously completely analogous, and the characters are very different, but still - I don't understand why Astrid gets so much hate while Cicero gets so much adoration.